Good to be home

I woke up this morning stinking of my own sweat in the top bunk of a cell in a pod in the county jail. I had to serve a day and served my day and now I am home. It was not merely hot, it was numbingly hot. Locked into a closet with some other guy who got bottom bunk because, well, he’d been there two days already.

I did a lot of sleeping and a lot of wishing I was not there. The air was dead and the sweat was shvitzing out of my head. The bunk was metal and between me and the bunk was a three-inch-thick piece of foam rubber. I didn’t sleep so much as observe my mind grabbing various thoughts and piecing them together one after the other like Tetris pieces if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Outside, the guards were shouting at the inmates at one point for not running to their cells fast enough. “If one of us, fucken, tells you to move your fuckin’ asses, you fuckin’ do it with a sense of emergency. I fuckin’ mean it.” Yes, he did pronounce it “fucken.” And let’s not talk about the “sense of emergency” line. Did it bug me? Yes, for a while, mainly because it was something to occupy my mind. I really didn’t give a shit either way. I just wanted out.

I’d grabbed a miraculous copy of Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer from the bookshelf before they locked us down. I’d first read it when I was 13, and barely remembered the plot. I polished it off in maybe two hours, then was back to the Tetris pieces in my head.

The guy in the bottom bunk had pulled his foam rubber mattress out of the bunk and onto the floor, and laid on the pad so his head was near the door, and maybe two feet from the metal toilet/sink in the corner. What’s interesting now that I think about it is that I could piss that near his head, but shitting near him was out of the question. Perhaps because pissing is quick and doesn’t require dropping trou and staring at the wall next to his head while trying to push one out. I mean, he was an OK guy, and we got along as well as two people in a fucking closet that stank of sweat could get along, but I needed to shit, and couldn’t with him there.

Consequently once I was able to drop that deuce it was wonderful, first of all, and second of all it set the stage for what happened a few hours later after I ate the most wonderful hamburger and shake in existence. Let’s just say the poor toilet here got taught a real lesson and leave it at that. Thank Christ the shower was right there.

This was my day, and I needed to write it out. And if any of this sounds cliche or trite or boring to you, I understand, and ask that you go fuck yourself with all due haste, and I mean that in the nicest fashion.